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Jerry A. Coyne has written a review for The New Republic of two books that attempt to synthesize evolution and theism, one by Karl W. Giberson, and the other by Kenneth R. Miller. I think that the review is deeply misguided. It must be close to 10,000 words long, so I’ll address just a few of the things Coyne says that are most crucial for his argument.

Coyne responds to Giberson and Miller’s claims that the evolution of humanoid intelligence was inevitable by saying:

Reading this, many biologists will wonder how he can be so sure. After all, evolution is a contingent process. The way natural selection molds a species depends on unpredictable changes in climate, on random physical events such as meteor strikes or volcanic eruptions, on the occurrence of rare and random mutations, and on which species happen to be lucky enough to survive a mass extinction. If, for example, a large meteor had not struck Earth sixty-five million years ago, contributing to the extinction of the dinosaurs—and to the rise of the mammals they previously dominated—all mammals would probably still be small nocturnal insectivores, munching on crickets in the twilight.

This response is quite problematic. Coyne’s demonstration that we know that humanoid consciousness could not have been inevitable because evolution is “contingent”, depends on “unpredictable changes” and “random physical events” is an attempt to sweep a lot under the rug. In fact, even the “random” elements of evolution — for example, mutation and crossover — are really pseudo-random. For example, if a specific mutation is caused by radiation hitting a nucleotide, both the radiation and its effect on the nucleotide are governed by normal physical laws. Human uncertainty in describing the evolutionary path that results, which as a practical matter we refer to as randomness, is reducible entirely to the impracticality of building a model that comprehensively considers things such as the idiosyncratic path of every photon in the universe compounded by the quantum-mechanistic uncertainty present in fundamental physical laws that govern the motion of such particles. As a practical matter, we lack the capability to compute either a goal or the path of evolution, but that is a comment about our limitations as observers, not about the evolutionary algorithm itself.

On the other hand, I share Coyne’s skepticism about Miller or Gibertson’s assertion that we know (in any scientific sense of the word “know”) that evolution must (or in Miller’s terms, was extremely likely to) generate humanoid intelligence. But this doesn’t mean that it was not inevitable, simply that we lack knowledge of whether it was or was not. One can reject Miller and Gilbertson’s claim that we know it must have happened this way, but also reject Coyne’s strong claim that we know it was not inevitable. One is left with the much more modest claim that at present there is no scientific answer to the question of whether humanoid intelligence was inevitable or not. But this does not imply incompatibility of science and theism.

Coyne is similarly confused about the philosophical issues surrounding what is called “fine tuning” by some theists, and called “the anthropic principle” by some scientists: roughly, the observation that if any one of a large number of physical constants had even a slightly different value, then human life would be unlikely or impossible. The “fine tuners” argue that this is evidence of the existence of God. Instead of simply pointing out this is an obviously unscientific assertion, Coyne’s feels the need to invoke alternative potential scientific explanations.

First, he says that “Perhaps some day, when we have a ‘theory of everything’ that unifies all the forces of physics, we will see that this theory requires our universe to have the physical constants that we observe.” Somebody ought to highlight the problem of infinite regress to him, because this would simply raise the obvious question of why these forces of physics require our universe to have the physical constants that we observe.

Next, he presents a second alternative, citing “intriguing ‘multiverse’ theories that invoke the appearance of many universes, each with different physical laws; and we could have evolved only in one whose laws permit life.” The multiverse theory may or may not be true for all I or anyone else knows, but given that we can’t observe other universes, it’s about as falsifiable as my theory that these various universes were created at the beginning of time through a titanic battle between Gilgamesh and Santa Claus. Given, as we’ll see, how ultra-falsificationist Coyne is in this essay, this is a pretty thin reed for him to support his argument. He never says that he knows it to be true, and presents it as a hypothesis, but it’s clearly a meant to provide a scientific-sounding alternative to the “God did it” position. It’s oogedy- boogedy for the Hyde Park set.

Coyne continues into the truth of religious belief, saying:

Truth implies the possibility of falsity, so we should have a way of knowing whether religious truths are wrong. …

Anything touted as a “truth” must come with a method for being disproved—a method that does not depend on personal revelation.

Coyne here confuses the “possibility of falsity” with falsifiability. He goes on for several paragraphs in this vein. Falsifiability is roughly the property of a statement that it is possible to imagine, at least in principle, an experiment that could show a factual contradiction to the statement, and therefore prove it to be wrong. But of course this is Popper’s famous “criterion of demarcation” – the standard which he believed comprised the boundary between science and non-science. In Popper’s view, scientific statements must be falsifiable. While there has been an enormous amount of debate about and qualification of this criterion over the past 80 years, it clearly describes an important characteristic of truly scientific statements. I am highly aligned with this position (see, for example, Popper is my homeboy).

But what Coyne is implying here is that scientific truth is the only form of truth; that no other way of knowing anything has any value or worth. Let’s just say we part company there. In fact, one could take this as a healthy criterion of demarcation in the other direction. It may be that one way to know we’re avoiding “God of the gaps” theology is that we are considering non-falsifiable statements.

Finally we come to a part of Coyne’s argument (quoted by Andrew Sullivan in his blog) that asserts that “real” religious belief, if not certain academic contortions, is contradicted by science:

Unfortunately, some theologians with a deistic bent seem to think that they speak for all the faithful. These were the critics who denounced Dawkins and his colleagues for not grappling with every subtle theological argument for the existence of God, for not steeping themselves in the complex history of theology. Dawkins in particular was attacked for writing The God Delusion as a “middlebrow” book. But that misses the point. He did indeed produce a middlebrow book, but precisely because he was discussing religion as it is lived and practiced by real people. The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

That is, if we strip away all of the falsifiable statements that are made in practice by religions, we are left with something vanishingly close to materialism anyway. But consider, to use Coyne’s own logic of falsification, an obvious counter-example. By about the year 400, Augustine described a view of Creation in which “seeds of potentiality” were established by God, which then unfolded through time in an incomprehensibly complicated set of processes. By the 13th century, Aquinas — working with the thought of Aristotle and Augustine — identified God with ultimate causes, while accepting naturalistic interpretations of secondary causes. Today, the formal position of the Catholic church, incorporating this long train of thought, is that there is no conflict between evolution through natural selection and Catholic theology. So, in this example, we’re describing an orientation supported by those esoteric theologians Augustine and Aquinas, and promulgated today by that so-liberal-he’s-practically-an-atheist Pope Benedict in that weirdo minority Roman Catholic sect. You know, “unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.”

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i will note that many atheists who have been fighting against creationism in the “trenches” for decades have little use for coynes’ line of argument. eugenie scott told me that he’s been going at this for decades, but doesn’t really have anything to, “OK, so now what?” that being said, coyne is a great scientist. just goes to show you need to separate science from scientists.

Re: On the other hand, I share Coyne’s skepticism about Miller or Gibertson’s assertion that we know (in any scientific sense of the word “know”) that evolution must (or in Miller’s terms, was extremely likely to) generate humanoid intelligence.

The way out of the conundrum is acknowledge that humans themselves are the result of many contingent events, and vary any of them and homo sapiens would not exist— but still insist that something like “human” consciousness would exist, in some other very different species. Quantum statistics leads to this sort of phenomenon all the time: the specific paths of individual particles are random, but the final state of the whole ensemble is not random, but tends to a defined and predictable end.

I think the last paragraph is too fast: it really is possible that the Pope’s particular views are contrary to the religious understanding of ordinary Americans, even Catholics who also say “the Pope is the arbiter of Christian belief.” The conflict would be analogous to philosophical distinction between de dicto and de re attribution of belief.

Jim: excellent discussion, and one I basically agree with. As I’ve said too many times at this point, I don’t think any sophisticated Christian (or Jew) should have a problem with evolution. It’s natural selection as the mechanism that poses problems – not to religion as such, but to certain religious traditions in particular. But I’m aware you disagree.

Miller and Gilbertson were arguing for (and Coyne reacting against) exactly this kind of broader “conscious being” idea, rather than literally homo sap.

Justin:

I agree that “Pope says, Catholics think” is way too simple. But I also think that “Person X says he believes that God guides evolution” in response to a phone poll doesn’t always mean exactly what Coyne argues it does either. That is, many religious conceptions are not well expressed by language. This is one of the many reasons that they are not well subject to falsification.

A nice try, but in A.D. 400, most Christians couldn’t read, let alone understand Augustine’s Neoplatonically-influenced Christian philosophy. There are over 150 million Catholics in Africa today. What fraction of them have even heard of Thomas Aquinas?

“But what Coyne is implying here is that scientific truth is the only form of truth; that no other way of knowing anything has any value or worth. Let’s just say we part company there. In fact, one could take this as a healthy criterion of demarcation in the other direction. It may be that one way to know we’re avoiding “God of the gaps” theology is that we are considering non-falsifiable statements.”

Yet Christianity, like all religions, is based on declaring the falsity of such ‘non-falsifiable’ statements, statements such as “Muhammad received and transmitted the revelation of God” and “Healing is due to the action of the god Aesclepius.”

I’d just add one thing to Noah’s comment. The mechanism of natural selection via the selfish gene is the problem: the vehicle as instrument only; the fact that genetic interest and vehicle interest are not coextensive; the fact that, in the long run, only genetic interest matters.

Nietzsche said, “Since Copernicus man is rolling from the center toward x.” It was this last adjustment that did it for me.

In fact, even the “random” elements of evolution — for example, mutation and crossover — are really pseudo-random.

This is a red herring, Manzi. If this is even true – and it’s not, we know from Bell’s Inequality that randomness does actually exist in the universe, it’s not just a function of deterministic physical laws too complicated for us to model – it would apply to all supposedly “random” events equally, like winning the lottery.

I mean, coming up with the right numbers could be viewed as a modeling problem; you just have to model all the ping-pong balls exactly accurately. But while we might agree with you that that’s only “pseudo-random” (leaving aside our knowledge, from experiment, that “God does play dice with the universe”) it doesn’t follow that that leaves any room for inevitable humanoid intelligence. After all, we couldn’t describe a lottery win as “inevitable”, would we? Even though your argument is equally applicable?

By about the year 400, Augustine described a view of Creation in which “seeds of potentiality” were established by God, which then unfolded through time in an incomprehensibly complicated set of processes.

Augustine? Seriously? Look, if you’re quoting Augustine you’re already a hundred miles from the Christianity the average American practices. You’re just proving Coyne’s point for him – only by recourse to obscure, liberal (in the classical sense) theologians can Christianity be reconciled with science. The Christianity of average Americans – which you have completely disregarded – is completely inconsistent with evolution, which is why creationism remains so popular.

That is, many religious conceptions are not well expressed by language. This is one of the many reasons that they are not well subject to falsification.

I don’t think “the Earth is only 10,000 years old” as a concept is too complicated to express in language, do you? How do you explain the popularity of this position if the average Christian is as theologically sophisticated as you seem to think?

Razib? Did you read Jerry’s line of argumentation in the review? And if so, what part did you object to, specifically? I wouldn’t recommend gleaning your impression from Jim’s take here, as he seems to express some controversial, minority opinions when he doesn’t say things that are just outright considered wrong by scientists.

@Jim
I mean, is there any group of physicists that are willing to make the claim that processes of mutation and sampling etc etc are deterministic at any meaningful level? (In fact, I’m not sure what Jim means by “pseudorandom”, as it has a very particular meaning in number theory, cryptography, and computer science which doesn’t correspond to his use at all.) Also, who said that multiverse theories of the universe are untestable? In fact, multiverse theories have passed considerable tests to even be considered at all. To my understanding, as currently formulated, they fit quite well with our observations of the known physical world, though as yet, distinguishing it from other cosmological theories is somewhat problematic due to the paucity of distinguishing data. In fact, if the data that would distinguish competing hypotheses are never found or are not feasible to collect, Occam’s Razor may suggest dumping multiverse cosomology. You can use this Discover Magazine article as a starting point: 3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang

And finally, I think one of Jerry’s positions can be summarized quite succinctly, and I think your summary doesn’t do it justice. Here it is:

“If religion were stripped of all falsified and/or un-repeatable/un-demonstrable claims and were offered as an alternative in a survey, very few people would claim to follow that flavor of religion when juxtaposed with mainstream interpretations of religion. This would preclude belief in such improbable claims as pi = 3, women are derived from male ribs, there are two contradicting creations, the entire earth flooded for 960 hours and all life was saved on a boat, resurrection occurred, water can be transmuted into wine, ascending to heaven on a white horse is one mode of transportation for God’s prophet, immaculate conception is how God gets down, virgin birth, angels, miracles, saints, bleeding relics, weeping relics, burning bushes that speak the wishes of the Creator, the sun stood still etc.”

Sure, there are many people (in an absolute sense, not a proportional sense) that would indeed prefer such a religion stripped of empirical claims, but then you start packing off towards Unitarian Universalist directions, and suddenly most of the world doesn’t look like that. I for one was taught (as fact) that the bible was literally true, that the earth was 1,000s of years old, that evolution was heresy, all Muslims would go to hell (Catholics and Mormons, too), and that putting up Christmas trees was a pagan ritual. I may have been in a minority with that specific constellation of beliefs, but many of them (as well as the ones above) are very prevalent all over the Christian world, and analogs of ridiculousness exist as well for other religions like Islam.

Can you seriously say that practicing Christians don’t compartmentalize and reserve one way of knowing for faith and use another way of knowing for the rest of their experience? In fact, most of my religious scientist friends (few and far between, most of us tend to be at the godless end of the spectrum) tend to explicitly claim a very esoteric compartmentalized version of faith and express to me the doubt that many of their friends and families would find their “enlightened” vision of religious truth compatible with their not “enlightened” con-religionists’ beliefs. This is an empirical observation. I can call up hundreds of friends and colleagues who would testify to that end. When asked to choose between Rick Warren and Augustine, I think a majority of people will be going with Warren.

It is to Catholicism’s credit that they actively edit their dogma to avoid collision with reality. At some point in the indefinite future, it seems likely that Catholicism will either regress to Fundamentalism or else cease to make any empirical claims about our current life at all, and focus entirely on metaphysics and the afterlife. If this is the case, then fine. But I don’t see how this differs from a tacit acceptance of Jerry’s (and Dawkins’) claim that science is the best way to test ideas about the hows and whys of the here and now.

I mean, is there any group of physicists that are willing to make the claim that processes of mutation and sampling etc etc are deterministic at any meaningful level? (In fact, I’m not sure what Jim means by “pseudorandom”, as it has a very particular meaning in number theory, cryptography, and computer science which doesn’t correspond to his use at all.)

I meant pseudo-random as in “mimicking randomness”. Very specifically, as per the post, I was making the point that scientists appropriately proceed as if these processes are random, because it is a practical impossibility to model them. But the algorithmic operators of selection, crossover and mutation do not actually impart incremental randomness to the outcome beyond any randomness already present in underlying physical laws.

Also, who said that multiverse theories of the universe are untestable? In fact, multiverse theories have passed considerable tests to even be considered at all. To my understanding, as currently formulated, they fit quite well with our observations of the known physical world, though as yet, distinguishing it from other cosmological theories is somewhat problematic due to the paucity of distinguishing data. In fact, if the data that would distinguish competing hypotheses are never found or are not feasible to collect, Occam’s Razor may suggest dumping multiverse cosomology.

Just so. This was the point I was trying to make with the Gilgamesh and Santa Claus corollary.

You can use this Discover Magazine article as a starting point: 3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang

Thanks for the passive aggressive pointer. Having done work in theoretical astrophysics at MIT directly under Philip Morrison, maybe I’ll skip that one.

And finally, I think one of Jerry’s positions can be summarized quite succinctly, and I think your summary doesn’t do it justice. Here it is:

“If religion were stripped of all falsified and/or un-repeatable/un-demonstrable claims and were offered as an alternative in a survey, very few people would claim to follow that flavor of religion when juxtaposed with mainstream interpretations of religion. This would preclude belief in such improbable claims as pi = 3, women are derived from male ribs, there are two contradicting creations, the entire earth flooded for 960 hours and all life was saved on a boat, resurrection occurred, water can be transmuted into wine, ascending to heaven on a white horse is one mode of transportation for God’s prophet, immaculate conception is how God gets down, virgin birth, angels, miracles, saints, bleeding relics, weeping relics, burning bushes that speak the wishes of the Creator, the sun stood still etc.”

Sure, there are many people (in an absolute sense, not a proportional sense) that would indeed prefer such a religion stripped of empirical claims, but then you start packing off towards Unitarian Universalist directions, and suddenly most of the world doesn’t look like that. I for one was taught (as fact) that the bible was literally true, that the earth was 1,000s of years old, that evolution was heresy, all Muslims would go to hell (Catholics and Mormons, too), and that putting up Christmas trees was a pagan ritual. I may have been in a minority with that specific constellation of beliefs, but many of them (as well as the ones above) are very prevalent all over the Christian world, and analogs of ridiculousness exist as well for other religions like Islam.

I don’t believe that I claimed that every religious tradition on earth did not conflict with science, but provided what seems to be a pretty big counter-example to the argument that this conflict is entailed by all religious belief as actually practiced by any large number of people. Unlike what you’ve presented here, let me put forward a falsifiable definition of what I think it would mean for a religious belief or organization to “conflict with science”: the religious organization should assert that a specific scientific finding that has been (i) confirmed through multiple replicated experiments, (ii) published in more than one major scientific journal and (iii) accepted as scientific fact by experts in the relevant field, is untrue by dint of religious revelation. I challenge you find one significant example of such conflict in all of the following religious bodies: the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church USA and the Presbyterian Church USA.

Can you seriously say that practicing Christians don’t compartmentalize and reserve one way of knowing for faith and use another way of knowing for the rest of their experience? In fact, most of my religious scientist friends (few and far between, most of us tend to be at the godless end of the spectrum) tend to explicitly claim a very esoteric compartmentalized version of faith and express to me the doubt that many of their friends and families would find their “enlightened” vision of religious truth compatible with their not “enlightened” con-religionists’ beliefs. This is an empirical observation. I can call up hundreds of friends and colleagues who would testify to that end. When asked to choose between Rick Warren and Augustine, I think a majority of people will be going with Warren.

It is to Catholicism’s credit that they actively edit their dogma to avoid collision with reality. At some point in the indefinite future, it seems likely that Catholicism will either regress to Fundamentalism or else cease to make any empirical claims about our current life at all, and focus entirely on metaphysics and the afterlife. If this is the case, then fine. But I don’t see how this differs from a tacit acceptance of Jerry’s (and Dawkins’) claim that science is the best way to test ideas about the hows and whys of the here and now.

As per my post, my point about this was not to dispute that science is “the best way to test ideas about the hows and whys of the here and now”, but rather that such knowledge exhausts valid knowledge.

1. Please see comments above on randomness. All of the randomness you describe is quantum mechansitic, which is why I provided exactly this caveat in the post to make the point that the evolutionary process itslef adds no incremental randomness beyond this.

2. Please see the comments above. I offer you the same challenge.

3. Once again, “person X who says he is religious believes Y which is contradicted by science”, doesn’t imply that “no substantial number of people who say they are religious have beliefs that are contradicted by science”.

Regarding the passive aggressive assertion. Were you anyone other than a specialist, my reference wouldn’t have been perceived as passive aggressive. It was merely a reference. And to non-specialists, Discovery is a fine entry-point into decent (well, relatively decent) science journalism. I can understand how you’d be insulted by being pointed to a layman’s reference given your background, and for that I apologize. However, it was an unintentional result of a gap in my knowledge about your CV (I usually don’t subject blog authors to ISI searches) and was most assuredly was not passive aggressive. If I think you’re full of it, I’ll come right out and say it. I don’t think you’re full of it, so I haven’t said it. I do have finer points of disagreement though.

Thanks for the back and forth. You have made me re-evaluate the weight I give to faith as a source of disconnect between science and religion. Previously, I had weighed it as equally important to the empirical claims of religion. But now, I think it is the centrality of faith to religion that is the fundamental reason that religion and science often conflict. If you think that this is correct and that Coyne doesn’t share this perspective and instead puts all his eggs in the empirical evidence basket, then I’ll concede your criticism of Jerry’s review. My response is almost entirely directed at your last paragraph in the original post. I would love to take it piece by piece (esp. given my first reply), but I’m stealing time from work to do this. If you want a reply to the other points (a fair request) I’ll be happy to provide it if you ask.

After re-reading your post, re-reading Jerry’s review, Allen Orr’s review of the God Delusion in NYRB, and letting it all simmer, I come to the same conclusion. Neither Coyne nor Dawkins nor anyone else (I may be projecting here) would particularly tangle with the particular official dogma/traditions/theology of the denominations you pointed out vis-a-vis your very carefully circumscribed criteria of “contradiction with scientific evidence”. And you can also add Anglicanism to that list as well. Nor would such atheists quarrel with deism.

Yet I believe we would all still have problems with religious faith. Ultimately, if a religion chooses carefully to avoid confrontation with science, then those religions that fall into the domain of “knowledge” that you argue (and I accept for the sake of argument) don’t overlap with science’s domain. As you point out, just because the holy text of a given religion says something wrong (pi is 3 for a trivial/too-cute example), that doesn’t necessarily mean that the elders or followers of that religion believe that. But here’s my problem. A corollary is, just because the elders claim something is or is not a tenet of faith, that doesn’t mean that the followers will accept the claims of the elders, and this is particularly likely if faith is a central tenet of the religion.

And this is why religion is all too often in conflict with science (and perhaps irreconcilably so in the case of big 3 monotheistic religions). If a follower believes something, and the arbiter of what is and isn’t correct is faith (because we all know that religious texts, doctrine, and leaders frequently contradict), then an elder or a particular interpretation of an old text won’t get in the way. In fact, this has been my experience. Even “enlightened” denominations like the ones you have mentioned seem to have quite a few adherents who will blithely mis-represent John Paul II’s or Ratzinger’s carefully crafted statements (or ignore them altogether) with respect to cosmology and evolution, for just two examples. And, at least in the south where I have the most experience, the run-of-the-mill Catholic, Episcopal, or Presbyterian believer frequently does in fact have serious qualms with the official doctrine with regards to many scientific facts and/or theories such as large swaths of cosmology and biology. This is more the rule than the exception. This is why it is irrelevant how compatible a faith is with science to start with. Such compatibility is easily eroded by faith. (I seem to be unconsciously converging on one of Sam Harris’s points here.)

Importantly, religious belief systems have a history of making false claims (as does science, make no mistake about my acknowledgment of that fact). However, the mechanism whereby science and religion are reconciled are one or more of the following: [1] corrosive to the founding principles of the religion (eg relaxing the faith in a personal God, ie a God who interacted/interacts with real historical people, past and present); [2] modify key claims so that the phenomena of interest still refer to the real world but the mechanisms are undetectably driven by God (human evolution in Coyne’s review); [3] abandon empirical claims altogether (Deism); [4] claim God is a synonym for nature (Spinoza, very crudely). Here, I don’t give science a special place. Science is corrosive to itself by its very nature. It may be said that a claim that cannot be challenged is not science, by definition. (As you know, some physicists attack string theory savagely on such grounds. I’m unequipped to comment on whether that is fair or not.) To use the trivial example, Newtonian physics is, at the very least, horribly non-general, and at the worst wrong, but a crude approximation that is useful in a narrow range of scales. But this refinement of physics is the result of the scientific process that doesn’t cherish faith as central tenet. I don’t think religion can accept this and still be religion as we know and practice it.

Anyway, what I’m doing (other than wasting a lot of blog space) is trying to say that my reading of Coyne’s review isn’t that religion can’t be modified to co-exist with science at any point in time. No, my understanding is that all successful attempts to do so still incorporate faith in such a way that future conflict is practically inevitable. The coexistence of science and religion may be possible in the short term, but such coexistence occurs in a dynamic system. I believe that Coyne’s view is that coexistence is unstable. And the only way I can see to make a religion that isn’t unstable is stated in Coyne’s review:

«The easiest way to harmonize science and religion is simply to re-define one so that it includes the other. We may claim, for example, that “God” is simply the name we give to the order and harmony of the universe, the laws of physics and chemistry, the beauty of nature, and so on. This is the naturalistic pantheism of Spinoza. […]

But the big problem with this “reconciliation,” in which science does not marry religion so much as digest it, is that it leaves out God completely—or at least the God of the monotheistic faiths, who has an interest in the universe. And this is unacceptable to most religious people. Look at the numbers: 90 percent of Americans believe in a personal God who interacts with the world, 79 percent believe in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, and 72 percent in the divinity of Jesus. In his first popular book, Finding Darwin’s God, Kenneth Miller attacked pantheism because it “dilutes religion to the point of meaninglessness.” He was right.»

It seems that many efforts that fall short of that high level of “reconciliation” may potentially lead to a wonderful religion with arguably great tenets and practices in the short run. But inevitably, there will arise believers among such religions who change from treating faith and science as “nonoverlapping magisteria” to an overlapping state (sorry for the gratuitous Gouldian language). But, if that backdoor to fundamentalism were ever closed (ie faith as a central tenet were removed), where does that leave Catholicism et al.? Are they even still recognizable?

If you can say that faith need not occupy a central place in religion and that such religion can make all sorts of claims about morality, aesthetics, ethics, etc. that don’t ever conflict with empirical science, then I’d concede the point. But if such is the case, are you really in conflict with Jerry anymore? We all have such belief systems that, while frequently more trivial than religion claims to be, are nevertheless central to the lives of all atheists I know. Like love, appreciation of art, an appreciation of altruism, love (or hate!) of literature, an ability to engage in fiction, meditation, sports, etc. Science need not overlap or come into conflict with those. And I think many atheists might agree (maybe even Coyne).

I should have been more concise and should have stopped long ago. So, I’ll close here.

I think you’re being too apologetic here, LwPhd, because I think Jim Manzi is being either tendentious—in favor of some sort of religious or political belief of his—or obstreperous—obstreperous against the Coyne article the technical infractions of logical and factual argumentation he cites. I guess I don’t know Manzi well enough as a writer to judge which it is. I would rather ask Manzi about his personal beliefs: What are YOUR views about the compatibility of belief in God and belief in evolution?

I would also like to speculate about which of Coyne’s statements would most piss off a religious scientist (or science fan): “One cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time”? “The reconciliation [of God and evolution] never works”? “Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are immune to ugly facts. Indeed, they are maintained in the face of ugly facts, such as the impotence of prayer”? Or “And what could possibly convince people to abandon their belief that the deity is, as Giberson asserts, good, loving, and just? If the Holocaust cannot do it, then nothing will”?

P.S. I’m an Andrew Sullivan reader here because I am curious about the true origins of Life, the Universe, and Everything, and because I care about keeping Church and State separate. I believe freedom and truth are both at stake in the contemporary debate over Intelligent Design…because I see Intelligent Design as a Trojan horse for powerful patrons of the Church to use the Mob to gain sway over the State, the Academy, the People…and the Truth!

When someone confronted me on whether I believed in Darwin or the Bible, I felt quite nonplussed. I have never considered Darwin’s theory an object of belief, but rather an elegant theory with strong explanatory power. Faith, on the other hand, I have always experienced as a call to relationship.

Jerry Coyne’s argument contains an expression I found very telling, when he speaks of “polluting” science with the claims of religion. In fact, in order to do science at all, you have to do math, which entails pollution, so to speak, of this exact kind, because, as Kurt Gödel pointed out, every non-trivial mathematical system has unprovable axioms. In fact, the idea of a unified truth in science runs right through his article, where he speaks of the incompatibility of belief in science with belief in, say, the virgin birth. But to say that science discovers laws that admit of no intentional violation or even manipulation gives too much authority to science. I find it striking that Dr. Coyne does not appear to mention the modesty of scientific practise as one of its strengths.

One more thought, just to let you know I care about the Church, too, after a little reflection: I think Intelligent Design, that Trojan Horse, is also a way for its powerful patrons to use the Mob to gain sway over the Church, including the peaceable and cerebral Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Catholics! Exclamation point.

I think that the humans who were given authority in major religions (I’m speaking here only of the West) were in a position to make outrageous empricial claims and have them accepted by most people hundreds of years ago(even if Augustine, et al could see that this was a problem as long as 1,600 years ago). They did not resist the temptation to do this, and as science has advanced it has proven more and more of these claims to be wrong. Religions that continue to do this will be in an endless game, that they will keep “losing” in the way you describe. (The counter-argument is that lots of people wnat this, and therefore will continue to adhere to them. The sophisticated argument for why this is OK to do is that these religious beliefs will help these people, e.g., “Grand Inquisitor”)

So, more precisely, religions that make such empirical claims will lose among educated populations. Assuming we keep growing world incomes, this will presumably be a global phenomenon.

Of course, this raises the question of whether there is some “criterion of reverse demarcation” that will create some stopping point in this process, or whether religion will basically be driven to a smaller and smaller patch of ground and finally into nothing. I think Popper (again, with many caveats) provides it: religion, properly considered, should confine itself to non-falsifiable claims. Science should never have the capacity to intrude on this. Many, many things that people consider most important are non-falsiable, and in my view, are the core religious questions.

My beef with Coyne on this score is that he is making, in a way, the exact reverse error that “imperial religion” does: imagining that it has a methodology that can answer any question worth asking; that the list of questions that can be addressed by the scientific method (againn, “can” not “are now”) exhausts the list of worthwhile questions.

Jim: religion, properly considered, should confine itself to non-falsifiable claims. Science should never have the capacity to intrude on this.

There are two problems with this formulation. One, pace Popper, falsifiability is important but not central. Reducibility and connectivity are the primary virtues of propositions.

Two, insofar as religion is relevant, it concerns itself with Kant’s second question — What Ought I Do? — and third question — What May I Hope? It does this by embedding conclusions in an undisciplined narrative that is emotionally resonant but conceptually shallow.

All of the randomness you describe is quantum mechansitic, which is why I provided exactly this caveat in the post to make the point that the evolutionary process itself adds no incremental randomness beyond this.

That’s fair enough, but again I think that proves Coyne’s larger point that the attempt by Miller and Gilberson to create an “in” for divine intervention – specifically, to create humanoid intelligence – is doomed to fail, because the “randomness” of random mutation in evolution isn’t really more or less random than anything else in the universe, and therefore to say that God intervenes at the lowest level of point mutations or even to influence quantum events really means just as much supernatural interventionism as medieval Christianity ever featured. In for a penny, in for a pound, if there’s really no difference between quantum randomness and any other event in the universe we view as “random.” Miller and Gilberson’s religion is no less “magical thinking” than faith healing.

I offer you the same challenge.

I don’t find your “challenge” particularly valid, given that out of your three, only the Catholic Church puts itself in the position of being the universal and singular source for lay doctrine for its believers – and even Catholics, in practice, don’t take that particularly seriously (example: Andrew Sullivan’s position on homosexuality.) Really, what the Catholic, Episcopal, and Presbyterian national churches may have to say on it is essentially irrelevant in terms of the phenomenon of religion. They do not, in practice, dictate dogma to a majority of American Christians (or any Christians, for that matter.)

That’s Coyne’s whole point, and I wonder if you missed it or are just ignoring it: it’s only in the rarified, academic, useless world of highbrow, intellectual theology that religion can be reconciled with science, and that’s only because those academic court theologians have neutered their dogma of anything that might conflict with science.

But that essentially never trickles down to religion as actually practiced, and the evidence for that is how many religious Americans, without reservation, will assert their profound belief in an Earth only 10,000 years old. And contrary to what you’ve tried to palm off on me I don’t see how that can be explained simply by the ambiguities of religious concepts in language; no one, to my knowledge, is ambiguous about which planet is called “Earth”, how many 10,000 is, or how long one year is. You can keep pointing to all the church authorities that you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re making a fallacious argument from authority as opposed to addressing religion as it is actually practiced by the religious in America, as Coyne does.

Once again, “person X who says he is religious believes Y which is contradicted by science”, doesn’t imply that “no substantial number of people who say they are religious have beliefs that are contradicted by science”.

I’m going drop the spurious “no”, in there, since it’s the only way your comment makes sense. And you seem to have mischaracterized our exchange – we’re not talking about one person who maintains a belief in an Earth only 10,000 years old; we’re referring to a significant number of American Christians who answered the affirmative to that position.

So, my challenge first, please. How can the popularity of that position be reconciled, in your view, with a lack of inherent conflict between science and religion?

One last thing:

My beef with Coyne on this score is that he is making, in a way, the exact reverse error that “imperial religion” does: imagining that it has a methodology that can answer any question worth asking; that the list of questions that can be addressed by the scientific method (againn, “can” not “are now”) exhausts the list of worthwhile questions.

You seem to take it as a given that this is wrong. I do not. A “meaningful question”, by definition, must be a question with an intelligible answer; otherwise, we’re talking about a question like “what is the meaning of life?” where the answer is simply whatever it takes to get you, personally, up and out of bed in the morning. Those questions may feel significant but in terms of their value to human knowledge, they’re really not.

A meaningful question must have a meaningful answer, and that means that the answer must be something in which we can have more confidence than if we had just made it up. In that sense, it’s not at all clear to me that Coyne is wrong – if there’s any alternative to answering questions via the tools of secular reason, any alternative that is distinguishable from our own imaginations, no one has ever provided it. It’s not at all unreasonable to suggest that secular reason encompasses the whole of meaningful knowledge when all the known alternatives are exactly the same as just making it up.

I agree (and said so) that the claim that we can “find God” in some scientific sense doesn’t work, for Miller, Gilbertson or anybody else.

Ignore for a moment the leadership of those churches. Show me a conflict with science (by the definition that I provided above) by the vast majority of U.S. adherents to each of those religions.

The grammar may be tirutred, but the “no” isn’t spurious. What I’m trying to say, as per the prior point, is that I can find a lot of people (like creationists) who hold religious beliefs that directly conflict with scientific findings, as per my definiton of conflict. That doesn’t mean that, as per Coyne, religion that is actually practiced and does not so conflict would not be “recognized as religion”. As an analogy, lots of things believed by Catholics are not believed by Jews and vice-versa, but I would still say that both are recognized in normal parlance as religions.

I don’t agree that “Those questions may feel significant but in terms of their value to human knowledge, they’re really not.”

Show me a conflict with science (by the definition that I provided above) by the vast majority of U.S. adherents to each of those religions.

I was under the impression that I have been. 73% of Evangelical Protestants, for instance, believe in an Earth only 10,000 years old. 39% of “regular” Protestants and 41% of Catholics agree.

At the very least that’s a considerable indictment of Evangelicals, but 41% of Catholics – supposedly informed by their pontiff that there’s no contradiction between their faith and the evolutionary timescale – believe it too. That’s quite a few if it’s the official position of the Church that the scientists are not, in fact, wrong. What’s your objection to this example, precisely?

That doesn’t mean that, as per Coyne, religion that is actually practiced and does not so conflict would not be “recognized as religion”.

Doesn’t it? There are ample religious authorities who would describe your liberal faith as weak, or even faithless; as no better than atheism. My church – evangelical, but not unique in any way – referred to that sort of faith as “going through the motions”. I think if you were to describe your beliefs to Rick Warren, or to Pat Robertson, they would tell you that they do not recognize you as Christian. It’s only necessary to pop open a Jack Chick tract – handed out by mainstream churches at every state fair I’ve ever been to – to see that your Catholicism, or any kind of “intellectual” faith is viewed, at best, as a kind of mistake; and at worst as a kind of European, anti-American cult of satan.

When Coyne says that most Americans would not recognize your faith, or the faith of Miller or Gilberson, it’s not because he’s making a hasty generalization from too few examples; it’s because he’s better informed about the whole of American Christian experience than you seem to be.

As an analogy, lots of things believed by Catholics are not believed by Jews and vice-versa, but I would still say that both are recognized in normal parlance as religions.

That’s obvious, but again you’ve missed Coyne’s point completely. Seems like you’re going for the low-hanging fruit instead of grappling with his point.

I don’t agree that “Those questions may feel significant but in terms of their value to human knowledge, they’re really not.”

I sort of expected you not to agree. I was hoping, though, that you could at least say why, given that I made an argument for my position and you, so far, really haven’t. What alternatives to secular reason exist that produce answers distinguishable from invention/imagination?

I have basically the same question as Alan. Let’s accept for the moment your figure that 59% of Catholics think the earth is more than 10,000 years old. That’s roughly 40 million people. At what point does somebody else, or some other body, get to count as being able to assert that this is “not real religion as experienced by real people” or whatever.

Further, as per Alan, what evidence do you have that Rick Warren et al hold this opinion; that they consider these people not just “not Christian” but actually “not really religious”?

Yes, I was lazy in not explaining why I disagree about the value of poetry and inexpressible emotion, but I just figured it was too huge a topic, and me too weak a discussant, to get the job done. I figure we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one.

I don’t feel qualified or inclined to argue on any side of this interesting discussion, but I have to say I am astounded by the statistic that 41% per cent of Catholics allegedly say they believe the earth is 10,000 years old.

I had an intensely full-blown, but rather ordinary (I’ve always believed) American Catholic upbringing, and I was never taught that, nor was I ever aware of any other Catholics who believed that. I’m not surprised that Evangelicals who believe in the literal truth of scripture would respond that way, but, again, my CCD classes expressly disavowed Biblical literalism. Was my little suburban parish that out of step?

Well, Jim and Alan, Chet says he actually attends an Evangelical (mega?) church where they believe in a supernatural god who does supernatural deeds, and where Rick Warren and Pat Robertson are probably respected if not revered. I feel it’s T.O.O., Tendentious Or Obstreperous, to speak as if Warren and Robertson do not actually mean it when they say they believe in that simple god in that simple way.

I feel it’s T.O.O., Tendentious Or Obstreperous, to speak as if Warren and Robertson do not actually mean it when they say they believe in that simple god in that simple way.

Fair enough. Now, where’s the evidence that either of them has said . . . whatever it is that you and Chet think they’ve said? Where’s the evidence that Pat Robertson and Rick Warren even have the same views about science? I’m not saying there is no evidence, I just like to find out, when people speak so boldly on behalf of others, whether they actually know whereof they speak.

You can slice & dice numbers to parse “as it’s actually lived,” but I think you need only point to the number of people who believe in angels and miracles and prayer over sickness, and the degree to which those things are part of culture i.e. in movies and music. I grew up in the South and lemme tell you there are a lot of people who fit Coyne’s definition. And for what it’s worth the vast majority of them are not Catholic, which until relatively recently was a dirty word down there.

I grew up in the South and lemme tell you there are a lot of people who fit Coyne’s definition.

Lot of people in other places too. But you all understand, don’t you, that that is completely irrelevant to Jim’s post? As is the question of what Pat Robertson or Rick Warren think about people whose theology is more liberal than theirs. Everyone understands that, right?

Coyne’s article is lithe and snappy, dealing confidently in the debate about the compatibility of science and religion. Manzi’s response overcompensates. His disagreements with Coyne practically sigh with pity. Coyne is “misguided” and “confused;” his analysis is “quite problematic.” Poor Coyne, Manzi seems to lament, just can’t grapple with so many big concepts. However, to my reading, it’s Manzi who is blowing hard to no avail. I can’t prove it, I just have a feeling Manzi is the lightweight on these topics and Coyne the journeyman— at least where the science debate is concerned.

Eager as Manzi is to flash his erudition, he should at least guard against a typo in his first sentence.

But Alan, the religious beliefs of the Mob are POLITICALLY relevant to my life, even if they are irrelevant to Manzi’s religious views as expressed in the article he kindly linked to above. As a matter of fact, I am inclined to agree with his point that it is quite possible for an educated rationalist to be a student of science and still entertain a faith in a supernatural Prime Mover sort of God somewhere out there in the realm of the unfalsifiable. I do it all the time. But guys, even as we speak, there is a Mob of people out there, trying to change our school curriculums and our laws about behavioral freedom to conform to their religion! So let’s not be T.O.O. with someone like Coyne, who’s speaking our language and participating in our ritual of making peaceable attempts to converge on Truth via Observation and Reason. I feel it plays into the hands of those who want to outlaw our tradition.

But Alan, the religious beliefs of the Mob are POLITICALLY relevant to my life, even if they are irrelevant to Manzi’s religious views as expressed in the article he kindly linked to above.

I can sympathize with that — though your Mob is a palpable fiction, consisting only of people who speak their minds and vote just as you do — but a lot of things are relevant to our lives that aren’t relevant to a particular post. And that kind of issue cuts several ways. I would argue that an essay like Coyne’s could potentially make your life and mine more difficult because it quite self-consciously builds and reinforces hostility between religious believers and scientists, and mocks people who are trying to find common ground.

But be that as it may, I think it’s in general a Good Thing to analyze arguments and find out whether they are sound or flawed, strong or weak. And some elements of Coyne’s argument are quite flawed indeed.

At what point does somebody else, or some other body, get to count as being able to assert that this is “not real religion as experienced by real people” or whatever.

The same point, I suppose, that allows Sarah Palin to declare that the 20% of Americans who live in small towns are the only “real Americans.”

But seriously though. The argument at hand, the one Coyne is responding to, is the one that says that no argument against religious faith is valid unless it assails the rarifed, academic theology that maintains separate magisteria by neutering religious thought of any position that could conflict with the scientific consensus – that to attack anything else is to attack a “strawman” of religion. See basically every response ever to Dawkins/Harris et al.; “oh, they’re not talking about real belief in God.”

But clearly that’s absurd; when as many as three-quarters of a religion’s adherents dismiss geology, paleontology, and biology simply on the basis of a religious text they usually don’t even read, it’s clear that the strawman of religion being set up is the strawman of Augustinian theology being anything more than a laboratory curiosity, so to speak. Religion’s defenders are doing yeoman’s work trying to defend their faith, but the problem is – their faith is essentially irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the popular phenomenon of religion, which no one has stood up to defend because it is indefensible. “Academic” religion almost isn’t religion, by comparison. If you attack Dawkins (or attack Coyne attacking Miller attacking Dawkins, which is kind of where we are now) because he doesn’t address your faith, where you believe that “God” is a metaphor for love, or community, or shared human experience, or a depth of contemplative emotion, or whatever – anything but a real God, who really exists, with the will and ability to physically intervene in the universe – there’s no need for Dawkins to attack your “faith”, because you don’t have any. You’re an atheist, just like me. (This is to speak in the general, not specifically to you, Jim, since I wouldn’t presume to guess what you believe.)

Chet, the attempt by Coyne, Dawkins and others to say that they only have to address the theologically ill-informed, because only they are the real believers, has been addressed by Karl Giberson here:

“Coyne, who affirms Dawkins’s approach, speaks of ‘theologians with a deistic bent’ who inappropriately presume to ‘speak for all the faithful.’ The implication is that the ‘faithful’ are the more authentically religious and the theologians are an aberration. This seems unfair to me. The great unwashed masses of these ‘faithful’ should be juxtaposed with the great masses of people who ‘believe’ in science but are not professionals. Most Americans—and the rest of the world, for that matter— are attached to both iPods and a belief that medical science is their best hope when they are sick. They ‘believe’ in science. What do you suppose ‘science’ would look like, were it defined by these ‘believers’? The physics would be Aristotelian; astrology and aliens would accepted as real; General Relativity would be unknown; quantum mechanics would be perceived as a way to influence the world with your mind. And yet all of these people would have had far more education in science than the typical religious believer has in theology. Science as ‘lived and practiced by real people’ is quite different than the science promoted by the intellectuals in this conversation.”

Anyone who is serious about a conversation like this will try to address the strongest defenders of the other side, not the weakest. That’s why I (and I expect Jim as well) am responding to Coyne rather than picking the low-hanging fruit of which the internet provides an overabundance.

Chet, Joseph Weizenbaum had an apt retort to the argument that we should adapt our values to the tools we have available: he called it the logic of the drunk who looks for their keys under the lamp post, rather than the place where the keys actually fell, because the lamp post provides much better light.

It seems to me that blaming religion for popular misconceptions about science falls into the category of “quantifiable” questions that do not actually matter very much, but which you can answer with a survey, which appears to have a “scientific” aura. However many Americans believe in a “young Earth”, I agree with Alan Jacobs’s; plenty of secular Americans harbour nonsensical views about science. I only differ with Alan Jacobs on one trivial point: I suspect that where Americans today harbour misconceptions about physics, more of those misconceptions originated with Gene Roddenberry than with Aristotle.

The critical question, for me, comes down to this: does the longing expressed in the song “By my side” from Godspell, or the sense of awe and wonder we can feel in the world or in other human beings, or for that matter our very consciousness, have a transcendent meaning? Does a Creator call us into relationship, and through a relationship with the Creator, a relationship with everything created? It seems to me that in places in his essay, Jerry Coyne attempted to answer this question in the negative by positing science as a vast and seamless edifice which could effectively keep the Creator out. And here I simply disagree, because I believe that the existence of undecidable propositions and their consequences in computability theory indicates that science and reason as a seamless edifice simply does not exist. You can argue that the Creator does not exist. I do not believe you can argue that science has no gaps in it, and that science thus leaves no room for the Creator. Whether the Creator exists or not, the irreducible gaps in scientific understanding do.

That may well be true, but the article here refers to “hominid consciousness”
Quite frankly we know so very little about the phenomenon of consciousness that I don’t think we can make any meaningful noises about it one way or the other when discussing vast cosmological issues.

A “meaningful question”, by definition, must be a question with an intelligible answer; otherwise, we’re talking about a question like “what is the meaning of life?” where the answer is simply whatever it takes to get you, personally, up and out of bed in the morning. Those questions may feel significant but in terms of their value to human knowledge, they’re really not.

Since the fact that people do find reasons to get up and out of bed in the morning, go out into the world, and get stuff done is responsible for every human accomplishment ever, including the accumulation of all of the scientific knowledge we have, I would say that “What is the meaning of life” is actually a extremely meaningful question, even if it is difficult to answer in an objectively provable way.

1.) Let’s assume (for the sake of argument) that there is no God. Let’s also assume (not for the sake of argument) that I really believe that there is a God. Furthermore, let’s also assume (also not for the sake of argument) that I belong to a church that not only does not require me to torture other people for having different beliefs or to impose my beliefs on other people’s educational systems or in their bedrooms or whatever, but in fact positively forbids me to do such things. Finally, let’s assume that this church encourages me to accept the factual findings of science (if not necessarily all the philosophical implications science draws from them) and in fact is based on the teachings of a scientist. (no, it’s not Christian Science, before you ask!)

Now, if these beliefs bring comfort and companionship and structure and meaning and happiness to my life, without serious negative consequences to others, is that such a bad thing? I mean, it’s not like I’m going to look back after I’m dead and be disappointed that I was wasting my time, right? If there is no God, existentialism pretty much becomes the only sensible way to approach life, and again, as long as I don’t hurt others, one approach to life pretty much has the same value as another, right?

2.) Again, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no God. If that’s the case, it is also reasonable to assume that there is no soul. That means that all “I” am—and everyone else, for that matter—is the big hunk of meat inside my skull. That, in turn, is basically dictated by the interaction of zillions of quarks every nanosecond or whatever.

If this is the case, then there is really no such thing as free will, because there is no “I” independent of what my quarks are doing at any given moment. Therefore, there’s nothing I can do about the fact that I’m religious—my quarks have jumped in that particular direction, and not only do I have no say in this, but there is no me to say anything different anyway. The same is equally true with atheists—their quarks have jumped in the opposite direction from mine, and there’s nothing they can do about it either. So what’s the point of complaining about people being religious? Under the materialistic theory, it’s just a fact of nature. :-)

1) Suffice to say, dperry, that if the only religion that would be unobjectionable to an ethos of secular reason is a religion that has never and in all likelihood will never exist, and in practice is indistinguishable from atheism, that’s not much of an argument in favor of religion. It’s precisely because the world’s religions favor torture and imposition of belief and denial of scientific reality, to varying degrees of each, that they remain forever irreconcilable with secular reason.

2) Lack of a soul doesn’t imply a lack of free will. (Also, your conclusion contradicts your premises, like most people who try this argument.) For instance, here’s one take:

1.) Actually, it does exist, or at least as close a facsimile as you’re going to get in this world (there was a reason why the assumptions I applied to myself were not for the sake of argument). Check out http://www.newchurch.org/beliefs/index.html or Google “emanuel swedenborg” if you’re interested. I’ll give you one quote, just so you know I’m not completely making this up:

Second: The internal is so averse to compulsion by the external that it turns itself away. This is because the internal wishes to be in freedom, and loves freedom, for freedom belongs to the love or life of man, as was shown above. Therefore, when freedom feels itself being compelled it withdraws as it were within itself and turns itself away, and regards compulsion as its enemy; for the love that constitutes the life of man is irritated and causes the man to think that in this matter he is not master of himself, and consequently that his life is not his own. Man’s internal is such from the law of the Divine Providence of the Lord that man should act from freedom according to reason.
[4] From this it is clear that it is harmful to compel men to Divine worship by threats and punishments.

And by the way, we believe in all of this while still believing in a personal, loving, omnipotent God. Most of the people in the church that I know are as far from being atheists as you can get.

Also, you haven’t answered the question. You’re perfectly justified in being opposed to people who want to hurt you because of your atheism, or who want to force it down your kids’ throats in school, or whatever. And I will grant yours’ and others’ point that people like me are in the minority in American religion (though I’m hoping we can change that.)

But the gentleman who wrote the article wasn’t saying that religion is bad only when it has negative effects on him and others like him. He’s saying that it’s always bad for people to hold religious views. I’ll go even further: I tend to agree with the guy who says that quantum mechanics just appears to be random, that God is really shaping things at that level. However, I’m perfectly willing to admit that a.) I can’t objectively prove that and b.) even if it’s true, I am not capable of perceiving God’s influence, and therefore, if I ever have reason to work with quantum mechanics, I must proceed as if it really is all a matter of probability.

So again, if all of this is the case, why do you and the author care what I decide to believe otherwise? As Jefferson would say, how am I picking your pocket or breaking your leg?

2.) a.) How does my conclusion contradict my premises?
b.) As far as I can tell, the article you posted supports my point; it basically argues that our actions are controlled by “hard-wired” elements in the brain and that damage to the brain can limit or change our responses. Well, again, in the materialist view, the ultimate basis of reality is quantum mechanics. So all that stuff in the brain ultimately comes down to which way the quarks are jumping; whichever direction they go in, that’s what you’ll think and do. I don’t see any room for free will in that. Quite a few of the commenters on the thread seem to have no basic problem with that, by the way. I tend to take a position somewhere with the people mentioned in the last paragraph, in that I do believe that mind is partially a physical phenomenon and changes in the physical structure of the brain will limit how you can think and act (at least in this world). But I don’t accept the premise that it has to be either/or. I think we have both a brain and a soul.

Looking up dictionary.com, I see that ethos refers to “the fundamental character or spirit of a culture”. I do not believe that reason, as defined in the strict scientific sense, will stretch to cover all aspects of a culture while remaining consistent. I suggest that trying to stretch reason to define the fundamentals of an entire culture inevitably exceeds the bounds of computable logic. In theory, it may seem to make sense to only find questions you can answer with scientific certainty of interest; in practise, I believe we will always want to answer questions that we cannot effectively approach with scientific reason. Science has nothing cogent to say about the meaning of our lives and the just ordering of society. Indeed, when people have attempted top apply science to these questions, they have tended to produce results such as “scientific” socialism and eugenics, both of which produced a parade of horrors.

Well, whatever you say. Again this gets back to religion’s defenders being able only defend religion in its most rarefied, academic forms – instead of being able to defend religion as actually practiced by the bulk of the religious. And of course, I have only your word that it actually works like that in your church – if they don’t proselytize, one wonders how you ever knew to join in the first place. (You don’t have to tell me, I’m just saying – many objectionable features of religion are so common precisely because that’s what’s required to have a successful religion in the first place.)

So again, if all of this is the case, why do you and the author care what I decide to believe otherwise?

If you’re actually wrong, why is it better to be ignorant? If there actually is no God, and no good reasons to believe in one, but you insist on doing it anyway – why should we expect that to be a habit limited only to your Sunday morning activities? Once you’re in the habit of believing in God on the basis of no good evidence at all, why should we expect you to stop there, and not believe in other things on the basis of no good evidence?

And what’s to stop you from changing religions? I mean you’ve already made it clear you’re not evaluating them on the factual merits of their claims. The same thought process that gets you into your complete unobjectionable church now, it seems to me, could just as easily take you to fundamentalist Islam, for instance.

It’s the underlying mental habit of “faith”, ultimately, that is most objectionable. I don’t understand why you would expect your willful belief in factually false statements to be celebrated instead of criticized?

Therefore, there’s nothing I can do about the fact that I’m religious—my quarks have jumped in that particular direction, and not only do I have no say in this, but there is no me to say anything different anyway.

and

So what’s the point of complaining about people being religious?

Do you see the contradiction? If being religious isn’t a choice, then how can complaining about the religious be one? There’s either “free will” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) for all, or free will for none. Either way, the question is meaningless – either we have free will, and the religious are on the hook for their decision to be religious. Or they’re not, but neither are the atheists, and this whole discussion is all a part of our mental program – including the part where the atheists demand that the religious be on the hook for their “decision” to be religious.

Either we have “free will”, and our decisions matter – or we don’t have “free will”, but nontheless have been programmed (or something) to feel and act as though we do, and judge others for their actions and decisions. The question is basically meaningless, because both horns of the dilemma are the exact same thing: nobody gets a free pass for their actions, regardless of whether or not “free will” exists.

Do you see the contradiction? Again, it’s hard for me to explain something that should be so obvious.

Chet, you write as though you could actually prove religious beliefs wrong.

You can’t call religious belief “wrong” in this sense because, at their most basic level, the tools of science buckle when used against the essential claims of religious faith. We can’t “observe” our entire cosmos to the exclusion of the Creator. We can’t make a logical and consistent construct comprehensive enough to exclude the Creator. Not only do we know those things, we can rigorously prove the limits on our logical expression, and we base huge amounts of our technology on physics governed by beliefs about the limits of observation.

To take things a little further, we can’t use the scientific method to examine the possibility of a relationship with the Creator because the scientific method depends on the detached observation of a phenomenon by a conscious agent; in other words, on an I-it relationship. It seems pretty clear that for a limited human being to have a relationship with an omnipotent Creator would require an I-thou relationship. C. S. Lewis puts this in human terms when he points out that no scientific community would expect a scientist confronted with evidence of a cheating spouse to immediately and dispassionately design a set of experiments to prove or disprove the honesty of their partner. I would argue that any relationship that has progressed to the “experimental” stage has already, in all its essentials, come to an end.

My sister makes quilts. She’s got a tool she uses when creating new designs—it’s a little viewfinder that eliminates the color in a pattern so it can be evaluated purely in terms of value.

I’ve long thought that this was a good analogy for the set of conceptual tools called the scientific method. Science screens out the dimension of meaning or intentionality so we can interrogate the universe strictly in terms of cause-and-effect. It can be defined as the technique of viewing the universe AS IF God didn’t exist.

It’s a powerful tool and it’s yielded a great deal of useful knowledge. But to then turn around and try to use this tool to evaluate arguments about God is as silly as trying to evaluate color choices while looking through a color-elimination viewer. It contradicts the point of the tool.

Chet, you write as though you could actually prove religious beliefs wrong.

Because you can. “A man lived 2000 years ago who was killed and rose from the dead” is a testable claim. “Mohammed rose into the heavens upon a white horse” is a testable claim. “God is all-powerful and benevolent” is a testable claim. “God answers the prayers of the devout and just” is an especially testable claim. “The Earth is 10,000 years old” is a testable claim.

Religion is chock-a-block with testable claims – claims that not only are testable, but have been tested and found false. That is why every world religion, to a greater or lesser degree, has apprehended a threat from scientific progress – because science is a threat to a substantial portion of religion. Coyne makes that point in the review; Harris makes the same point (sarcastically) in the blog I linked to. Indeed, a substantial majority of scientists have arrived at precisely the same conclusions. The small minority of scientists who believe religion and science can co-exist have never, in 300 years, been able to convincingly advocate that position.

We can’t “observe” our entire cosmos to the exclusion of the Creator.

I don’t see why we’d need to do that, when God has been defined for us as existing in all points in space. It’s hardly necessary under that definition to go looking for God across the entire universe – a single location, such as our entire planet, is sufficient to conclude the nonexistence of a God defined in such a way that, if He is anywhere, He must be everywhere. (And thus, if he is not somewhere, he is not anywhere.)

It seems pretty clear that for a limited human being to have a relationship with an omnipotent Creator would require an I-thou relationship.

I don’t see anything clear about this statement. I see it as the kind of meaningless sophistry it takes to defend the existence of God in a universe that so clearly lacks one. I recognize the words as English but they have absolutely no meaning to me as a sentence. (This is a phenomenon I regularly experience in conversations with believers.)

C. S. Lewis puts this in human terms when he points out that no scientific community would expect a scientist confronted with evidence of a cheating spouse to immediately and dispassionately design a set of experiments to prove or disprove the honesty of their partner.

C.S. Lewis is perhaps the single worst apologist widely quoted on the internet, and this is why. Contrary to his absurd assertion, it would be a pretty poor colleague (or divorce lawyer, let us say) who would not advise our forlorn scientist to dispassionately assess his evidence, so that a conclusion of infidelity could be justified.

She’s got a tool she uses when creating new designs—it’s a little viewfinder that eliminates the color in a pattern so it can be evaluated purely in terms of value.

I’ve long thought that this was a good analogy for the set of conceptual tools called the scientific method.

It is a good analogy, but you have it precisely backwards – religion is the color-blocking tool, and secular reason – including but not limited to science – is when you put the tool aside and see clearly.

Chet, I have no idea how you think you could possibly design an experiment to test for the possibility of divine intervention. Absent any proposed designs, I can only assume you believe we can either observe the universe sufficiently to exclude any possibility of divine creativity (which we cannot do), or else construct a logical proof of the non-existence of a divine Creator (which we can rigorously prove we can never do).

I don’t see why we’d need to do that, when God has been defined for us as existing in all points in space. It’s hardly necessary under that definition to go looking for God across the entire universe – a single location, such as our entire planet, is sufficient to conclude the nonexistence of a God defined in such a way that, if He is anywhere, He must be everywhere. (And thus, if he is not somewhere, he is not anywhere.)

OK, let me put it more clearly and explicitly. The basic languages of science, mathematics and logic, both have limits that make it impossible to create a logical and consistent statement proving the existence or non-existence of a divine Creator. We can’t use math, we can’t use logic, and the limits of our observation make it impossible to claim that we have observed, or we understand, enought to exclude the possibility of the presence, or the influence, of the Creator. And these limits of science, or observation and logic, apply everywhere, from the photons in the computer monitor to the furthest reaches of the furthest galaxy.

I recognize the words as English but they have absolutely no meaning to me as a sentence.

Well, I did a google search for “I-thou” and got over 65000 hits, so you have plenty of information at your disposal if you want to try to understand what I wrote a little better. I would note that the approach you use in that whole paragraph breaks the rules of scientific analysis. You claim both a total lack of understanding of what I wrote, but at the same time you classify it as a “sophistry”. In other words, you claimed that you could not decode the observation you made (of what I wrote), but you then classified it despite that, in accordance with your preconceptions. In fact, the tenor of your argument tends to illustrate the general point I wanted to make: that the notion of a divine Creator does not lend itself to the detached analytical consideration the scientific method requires.

On the contrary. What he’s saying is that there is no such thing as “personal truth”, which would be an idiosyncratic and arbitrary redefinition of a word that is rationally taken to mean something that can be checked independently of any one person’s biases and actually did survive such a rigorous check.

But what Coyne is implying here is that scientific truth is the only form of truth; that no other way of knowing anything has any value or worth.

In what sense of the word “know” that isn’t completely useless in rational discussion involving more than one person do you claim that there is another form, and what form would that be exactly?

Okay, this discussion has progressed to an interesting point of disagreement. It seems like Jim Manzi and Alan Jacobs—and maybe John Spragge—are very interested in preserving room for God in the universe by postulating that he may be present in some location or dimension that we cannot presently find or perceive as human beings. They both find Jerry Coyne’s article too triumphalist in its atheism, it seems, because of the logical impossibility of declaring the search for God fruitless when we know we cannot see or know all that is. So let’s go back to Jerry Coyne’s main reason for publicly airing his possibly overdetermined atheism in the New Republic article: it was a review of two books that attempt to trace a pathway from scientific fact back to God’s existence. What do you guys think of GIBERSONANDMILLER’S logic? And, as believers in God (or at least agnostics, I don’t want to pigeonhole you just yet) who do not see a conflict between religious faith in God and belief in scientific truth, what do you think of Giberson and Miller’s enterprise in those two books?

Chet, I have no idea how you think you could possibly design an experiment to test for the possibility of divine intervention.

You’re just not thinking hard enough, then. Plenty of people have already designed tests to identify divine intervention in various areas and executed those tests; divine intervention has failed to be detected at every turn.

The simplest test I can imagine is simply praying for God to do something only God can do. This, of course, has never happened. But if you propose a God who takes action in the universe, then that action must be detectable, since it caused something to happen that wasn’t going to happen anyway. (Scientists have statistical tests to determine when things happen that weren’t going to happen anyway.) And, of course, if it was going to happen anyway, there’s really no way to say that God took action.

Divine intervention is detectable simply because it is an intervention. If God never ever intervenes, of course, he escapes detection – but such a God is irrelevant to human affairs, surely. Why believe in a powerless God? That’s just a kind of atheism.

The basic languages of science, mathematics and logic, both have limits that make it impossible to create a logical and consistent statement proving the existence or non-existence of a divine Creator.

I guess I’d like to see your work on that, because I don’t believe you. I think that the languages of science, mathematics, and logic, while surely limited, are not so limited to prevent investigation into empirical claims – claims like “God heals sickness”, “God intervenes in the universe”, or “persons survive the death of their bodies in some form.” These questions have been investigated and decided against the position of the believers, which is why believers correctly apprehend a threat from science.

I’m hardly alone in this position; it’s certainly the majority view of the community of scientists. Maybe it’s time to ask yourself why scientists seem to have little difficulty doing something you claim to be absolutely impossible?

Well, I did a google search for “I-thou” and got over 65000 hits, so you have plenty of information at your disposal if you want to try to understand what I wrote a little better.

Or maybe you could simply explain yourself. Like I said I know what “I” means, and I know what “thou” means. Taken together they don’t really impart any meaning to me. 65000 links is a lot of material. Maybe you could point out one or two links that succinctly describe what the hell you meant? I wouldn’t want to pick the wrong one, after all, and begin arguing against something you don’t believe.

I would note that the approach you use in that whole paragraph breaks the rules of scientific analysis.

I never claimed to be “scientifically analyzing” your post, as if such a thing were possible.

Ah, Chet — this is fun, by the way — so “Mohammed rose into the heavens upon a white horse” is a claim that has been tested and falsified? Can you just point me to that test? That’s all I’m really asking.

J Sagan, you make a good point. My comments (and I think this is true of Jim’s also) were responding to claims that Coyne made that are independent of Giberson’s and Miller’s arguments — that represent the basic stance that Coyne holds and from which he critiques these others. I’m about halfway through Giberson’s book, but haven’t yet read Miller’s (though a couple of years ago I did read Miller’s excellent Finding Darwin’s God). So I’m not yet in a position to evaluate either book.

Chet, can you explain how you get around the no-go theorems and in particular Gödel’s proof, to arrive at a formal system sufficiently comprehensive and consistent to exclude the possibility of a divine Creator? Right now you have made plenty of claims I do not think the scientific method has the ability to validate.

Peter Beattie wrote:

What he’s saying is that there is no such thing as “personal truth”, which would be an idiosyncratic and arbitrary redefinition of a word that is rationally taken to mean something that can be checked independently of any one person’s biases and actually did survive such a rigorous check.

So when someone says they love their spouse, or their kids, or their parents, you don’t regard that as a true statement? Or do you simply not regard it as a worthwhile statement? How would you test these statements?

The scientific method requires a dispassionate subject (the observer), a verb (observation and recording), and an object. The method does not work between two subjects, which explains why attempts to scientifically verify the existence of a Creator cannot work. Indeed, such attempts indicate either a complete misunderstanding of what religion and faith entail, or else a pretty chilling view of relationships, including human relationships. This kind of outlook, as Joseph Weizenbaum reminded us, does not come without a price. Just as we cannot formulate an effective test for love or the efficacy of prayer, so we cannot truly mount an effective scientific test for concepts such as right and wrong, justice and injustice.

Ah, Chet — this is fun, by the way — so “Mohammed rose into the heavens upon a white horse” is a claim that has been tested and falsified?

Abundantly. Of all the people who have ever ridden white horses, how many of them have verifiably found themselves conveyed into the heavens?

Chet, can you explain how you get around the no-go theorems and in particular Gödel’s proof, to arrive at a formal system sufficiently comprehensive and consistent to exclude the possibility of a divine Creator?

Why on Earth would I need to? I’m sorry but I really don’t think this argument of yours is offered in good faith. I perceive in this an attempt to snowball me, to intimidate me with big words and name-dropping.

Well, I know what Gödel’s’s proof states, indeed I derived a form of it in college, and it leaves you no room for God nor stands in the way of a proof of atheism. Nor is there any proven no-go theorem that could defend the existence of a divine creator.

How would you test these statements?

How would we test love? It seems to me that culture has supplied us with a number of ways to test love, since while any one of us is instantly aware of what we do and do not love, convincing others of that is never so easy. But aside from the traditional tests, science has revealed ample physiological characteristics of love, the presence or absence of which could be easily detected. Verifying the presence of love in a practical sense strikes me as no object at all to secular reason and science. (Ergo, how could a diagnosis of sociopathy ever be arrived at, if we could never ascertain whether someone loved or not?)

The scientific method requires a dispassionate subject (the observer), a verb (observation and recording), and an object. The method does not work between two subjects, which explains why attempts to scientifically verify the existence of a Creator cannot work.

But this is an absurd argument on every level. Firstly, it’s easy enough to disprove your “argument from sentences”: The subject of any verb may well be the object of another; you may do, but I may do to you. And secondly – we study subjects all the time. Indeed, that’s what we call the focus of a study: the subject!

And thirdly – “subject” and “object” are just words, they don’t really have anything to do with the scientific method, which you appear to be ignorant of. The scientific method is a process of reiterative observation, hypothesis testing, and controlled experimentation – and, most importantly, communication of results. It really has nothing in common with what you’ve written in this post.

I’m sorry John but I can’t for a minute bring myself to believe that this was an argument brought in good faith. To say something so absurd, there’s really no other explanation than you trying to either cloud the issue or have a good laugh at our expense. If God exists there will be good reasons and evidence to believe that. But there is not. That, ultimately, is the devastating atheist critique that, thousands of years later, believers have been unable to riposte. As much as they would like to confuse the issue with tortured metaphors, redefined terms, and philosophic sophistry, there’s just no good reason to believe in God. If they had one, it would have been provided by now.

Unlike what you’ve presented here, let me put forward a falsifiable definition of what I think it would mean for a religious belief or organization to “conflict with science”: the religious organization should assert that a specific scientific finding that has been (i) confirmed through multiple replicated experiments, (ii) published in more than one major scientific journal and (iii) accepted as scientific fact by experts in the relevant field, is untrue by dint of religious revelation. I challenge you find one significant example of such conflict in all of the following religious bodies: the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church USA and the Presbyterian Church USA.

I think this challenge misses the point. Here’s why: there are certain extremely clear examples of religious beliefs conflicting with (what Coyne calls) “secular reason“—e.g., certain notoriously daffy beliefs held by Mormons and upper-level Scientologists*. Indeed, a close look at these beliefs, I submit, will both ruin Manzi’s challenge and support Coyne’s point about the conflict between religion and science.

Here’s the problem. With these beliefs, it is undeniable that a basic respect for evidence and reasoning (the kind carried to great heights in the sciences) will brand them foolish in the extreme. And yet these beliefs do not contradict any scientific findings. But that means that, though these beliefs do fit Coyne’s understanding of a conflict between science and religion, they do not fit Manzi’s account. Manzi’s account must therefore be modified to account for these beliefs.

And here’s the rub: traditional Christians (including members of the non-evangelical Christian denominations mentioned by Manzi) are committed to beliefs that look to be every bit as daffy as the aforementioned beliefs—e.g., the Fall of Man, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of Christ, the Harrowing of Hell, the general resurrection, the reality of angels and demons, etc.

This leaves several dubious options: (i) say that there’s no conflict between secular reason and the beliefs of Mormons and Scientologists, (ii) say that such beliefs do in fact contradict scientific findings, (iii) say that traditional Christian doctrine is significantly more harmonious with secular reason than the beliefs of Mormons and Scientologists, (iv) say that traditional Christian doctrine is a misleading representation of religion as generally practiced by human beings, (v) say that Coyne’s understanding of the conflict between science and reason is significantly narrower than the sort of conflict pointed out in this comment.

* Examples include: the belief that Joseph Smith translated ancient texts written in “Reformed Egyptian” (from golden plates revealed to him by an angel) by looking into a hat with a seer stone and dictating to a person on the other side of a curtain; the belief that the spiritual potential of human beings is held back by their body’s being infested with brainwashed extraterrestrial spirits traumatized by an ancient space tyrant’s mass extermination project.

Chet, can you explain how you get around the no-go theorems and in particular Gödel’s proof, to arrive at a formal system sufficiently comprehensive and consistent to exclude the possibility of a divine Creator?

And why, pray, would he have to? A divine Creator is the thing that is being proposed, so evidence would have to be presented for that. No ateapotist would have to give any evidence for his lack of belief, because it’s such a patently stupid idea devoid of any meaning. It simply introduces a would-be explanation that would itself need a different explanation.

So when someone says they love their spouse, or their kids, or their parents, you don’t regard that as a true statement? Or do you simply not regard it as a worthwhile statement? How would you test these statements?

That old chestnut? Really? What do you think cuts less ice, your carefully concealed false premise that love is completely divorced from evidence or your barely concealed argument from personal incredulity? Why do you think it is that so often you can deduce from publicly available evidence that two people are in love? Of course there is evidence for love, and we read it intuitively. Just because we don’t usually observe these clues consciously doesn’t mean that they cannot be so observed.

Ah, Chet — this is fun, by the way — so “Mohammed rose into the heavens upon a white horse” is a claim that has been tested and falsified? Can you just point me to that test? That’s all I’m really asking.

Please do tell us, Alan, how that is not just trolling. Because it would seem to me that what you apparently believe is a clever “argument” is either you being intentionally dense, disingenuous, or putting out a whopper of a red herring.

Hi Peter, and welcome to the party! I asked Chet that question because I wanted to know the answer. If he had said something like, “We know what the laws of nature are, we know that the laws of nature are never violated, and therefore we know that Mohammed never did rise into the heavens on a white horse,” I would have understood him perfectly. And it turns out (based on his most recent comment) that he meant something like that. But what he originally said was that the claim that Mohammed rode a horse through the sky has been tested and falsified. So it turns out that Chet doesn’t know the elementary distinction between (a) a claim that we have overwhelming inductive reason to disbelieve and (b) a claim that has been actually tested and falsified. That was what I suspected, but I wanted confirmation.

It’s important to understand the nature of the claims that people are making. To Chet’s protest that other people haven’t ridden horses in the sky, the believing Muslim would say, “That’s right! We’re not claiming that other people have, only that Mohammed did. And it is precisely because other people don’t ride horses in the sky that we call what he did a miracle.” To Chet’s protest that Mohammed’s miraculous flight hasn’t been verified, that faithful Muslim might well reply that there is a world of difference between something not being verified and something being disproved. I have not verified Chet’s existence — as far as I know he could be an early attempt at AI — but that doesn’t mean that I have disproved it. As I say, these are elementary distinctions.

Likewise, if we say, “We know that miracles don’t happen because we know that the laws of nature are never broken,” all we are saying is “We know miracles don’t happen because we know that miracles don’t happen,” since a miracle simply is a violation of the laws of nature. You need better arguments than that. As it happens, some better arguments are out there, but I sure ain’t showing y’all where they are.

Oh, and just for the record, I don’t believe that Mohammed rode a horse through the sky.

The distinction you mention between being discredited by an overwhelming empirical trend and being disproven by empirical tests can, I believe, be used to undermine Manzi’s defense of religion. For, even if Manzi is right that mainstream religion has not had its tenets disproven by empirical tests, these tenets might nevertheless be vanishingly unlikely and thus unworthy of serious consideration.

Word up, Dave2! I’ve come to the conclusion that Manzi and Jacobs just want us to be old-school Anglo-Americans about the question of a (Judeo) Christian God, Containing Multitudes as we continue our important work in the world untroubled, and then go to Church on Sunday, if only in our heads. In the American Scene they hearken back to, the person filing out of the church might be a macroeconomist, a biologist, a jazz musician, or a grave digger…all are made alike in dignity at The Meeting in God’s House, either lifted up or taken down a necessary peg. They probably see men like Miller as the necessary and inevitable American corrective to crude Creationists. Only the super-intelligent, in this American Scene familiar from, oh, the writings of another Alan, Allan Bloom, are invited to seriously contemplate the vanishingly unlikely. “As it happens, some better arguments are out there, but I sure ain’t showing y’all where they are.” Of course you aren’t. “Oh, and just for the record, I don’t believe that Mohammed rode a horse through the sky.” Of course you don’t.

Likewise, if we say, “We know that miracles don’t happen because we know that the laws of nature are never broken,” all we are saying is “We know miracles don’t happen because we know that miracles don’t happen,” since a miracle simply is a violation of the laws of nature.

How can a law of nature exist if it can be violated?

And it is precisely because other people don’t ride horses in the sky that we call what he did a miracle.”

Well, that’s certainly a convenient argument – the less likely it seems, the more we should believe it, because it’s all the more miraculous. Harris rightly lampoons this argument, because it’s absurd. I thought he was just being cute but imagine my surprise – there’s a person out there who finds the argument compelling!

You need better arguments than that.

I need a better argument than “white horses have never been observed to fly”? That’s the miraculous power of religion, I suppose; it has the power to turn the ordinary rules of sense directly on their heads.

Why is it that no one can defend religion with arguments in good faith?

Chet, you have to come up with an argument in discussions like this. Claiming that you can’t believe we made our arguments in good faith doesn’t suffice. For example, you base your argument on the idea that you can falsify miracles on the grounds that nothing can violate the laws of nature. In the context of that argument, the limits of our understanding, of what we have in principle the ability to understand, have to matter. Simply asserting that the limits of knowledge don’t matter, like simply asserting that most scientists don’t believe in God, doesn’t suffice. Turning the words “bad faith” into a mantra does not work very well, either.

The argument from the laws of nature would contain a self-evident fallacy even without the limits on our knowledge: that matter behaves in consistent ways that we can extrapolate does not, by itself, mean that no conscious force set those rules, or that no force can amend them. To take a trivial example: an ai program running under unix might deduce, as a “law”, that no program can write to the /etc directory, because on most unix systems, you have to have root privilege to do so. From outside the environment of our imaginary ai task, we can see that root privilege does exist, and that a programmer with that privilege can, in fact, write to /etc. That root privilege exists does not invalidate that standard security rules of unix, nor does the existence of security rules in unix make root privilege impossible.

Peter Beattie wrote:

What do you think cuts less ice, your carefully concealed false premise that love is completely divorced from evidence…. often you can deduce from publicly available evidence that two people are in love? Of course there is evidence for love, and we read it intuitively.

Excuse me, but a world of difference separates the scientific method and a complete separation from evidence, just as a great difference separates the scientific method from intuition. If you object to faith because you can only accept rigorous and falsifiable observation as a basis for knowledge, then to remain consistent you must also reject intuition, as well as most of the other ways in which we actually relate to other people.

Chet, I should probably just drop it at this point, but I’ve developed a strange affection for you over the past couple of days. First, though, you should really read my comments in toto before replying to them; it would clarify a lot of things for you. Second, yes, you really do need a better argument than “white horses have never been observed to fly,” because that’s an assertion, not an argument. Another very important distinction. It is also begging the very question that is at stake at the moment, because the believing Muslim would say, “Yes, white horses have never been observed to fly, except for that time when Mohammed rode on one, by God’s empowerment.” Which leads me to my third point: you ask, “How can a law of nature exist if it can be violated?” Answer: if the laws of nature are made by a God who can also suspend or override them if he (or she, or it) wishes.

As I said earlier, “It’s important to understand the nature of the claims that people are making.” Otherwise why bother to get involved in a dispute like this?

To my fellow rationalists, brights, illuminati, eminences of ratiocination, and all persons of superior intellectual wattage and mental incandescence:

Don’t listen to David Hume and Chet and all the other closet religionists. They think that the best way to refute the miraculous is to disprove it. But that’s not just a dead end strategy—it delivers you straight into the hands of the misologists and Enemies of Reason, bolstering their benighted ignorance, fueling and justifying their anger against you, and prolonging their inevitable destruction.

If you want to storm the gates and trample the walls of supernaturalism and crush the heads of the Enemies of Reason and Nature against the rocks, you should devote every ounce of your being to verifying their “miracles.” Advocate with all your will and power and cunning the most extreme, literalistic sorts of creationism.

Are you really so dense? Don’t you understand that if you verify the supernatural, it ceases to be supernatural? Go for the jugular, my children: verify, confirm, prove.

In the context of that argument, the limits of our understanding, of what we have in principle the ability to understand, have to matter.

The limits of our understanding don’t matter. They don’t matter simply because they are a limit; whatever is beyond them cannot be part of a meaningful conversation, because by definition we’d be talking about something we couldn’t understand.

But the idea of God is clearly not beyond the limit of understanding, for either of us: it’s not beyond mine, because I apprehend quite clearly that there is no such thing as God, it’s just a kind of make-believe for adults. And it’s clearly not beyond yours, because you insist on making claims about it. I mean, you would never be so inconsistent as to make definite claims about something you didn’t understand, right?

So, the limits of understanding are not at all relevant, here.

From outside the environment of our imaginary ai task, we can see that root privilege does exist, and that a programmer with that privilege can, in fact, write to /etc.

And yet we could detect, John, if /etc/ had been written to. Even if every trace of the filesystem dates had been scrubbed clean and the last-modified flag in /etc/ had been altered, we could still detect the tampering – because something would be there that wasn’t there before. If there wasn’t – then nobody wrote to etc.

The idea of a God who takes undetectable action in the universe isn’t just inconsistent with sense, and inconsistent with observation. It’s inconsistent with the meaning of “action.” If God’s “action” is truly undetectable, then it was going to happen anyway – and if it was going to happen anyway, in what sense was action taken? You might as well claim that John Spraggue is held down in his chair by God pushing down on his shoulders, though for everybody else, simple gravity suffices. It’s just special pleading.

Second, yes, you really do need a better argument than “white horses have never been observed to fly,” because that’s an assertion, not an argument.

No, it’s a fact, and it’s one that absolutely no one in their right mind disputes – except when the context is religion.

Sorry, no. When my opponents insist on treating the most ridiculous positions as self-evident, the emptiest statements as being full of wisdom I’m simply too ignorant or stupid to apprehend – I really don’t need an argument. The case that religion is inconsistent with good sense and science is being amply made, for me – by you and John Spraggue.

Answer: if the laws of nature are made by a God who can also suspend or override them if he (or she, or it) wishes.

Why would I believe that such a being exists? Why would I believe that such laws have ever been suspended, or are even able to be? These are the basic questions that religious belief must avoid addressing at any cost.

Chet, you become more entertaining with every comment. You’re unaware that I haven’t even defended any religious beliefs, much less treated some as “self-evident.” Your straw men are evidently very dear to you — you believe in them more fervently than any religious fanatic believes in God. But that’s okay; we all have our irrational prejudices.

I have one last question for you, though. Let’s grant that you’re right: religious belief is utterly incompatible with good sense, and people who hold religious beliefs shut down their minds in order to “avoid addressing at any cost” the “basic questions.” In that case, why are you here? What’s the purpose or point of your comments? Why would you try to reason with people who, on your account, are incapable of reason?

You’re unaware that I haven’t even defended any religious beliefs, much less treated some as “self-evident.”

You seem unaware that I’ve never accused you of that. Someone once told me that their posts should be read in toto, and closely, for the best possible understanding. Who told me that? I don’t seem to recall but it’s good advice for you, now.

In that case, why are you here? What’s the purpose or point of your comments? Why would you try to reason with people who, on your account, are incapable of reason?

I didn’t say they were incapable of reason (just a little out of practice). I don’t think they’re incapable of reason. Who’s advancing straw-men now?

I’m here because I was once religious, now I’m an atheist, and it had nothing to do with any life event that caused me to “lose my faith” or become “mad at God” (as is the stereotypical portrayal of atheists.) I was convinced of the falseness of religion by the evidence and by my own reason, and so I have every reason to believe the same could be true for anyone else – even John Spraggue. Maybe even you, though of course you’ve offered nothing of your own beliefs (which I recognize as deliberate on your part) and I’ve taken pains not to assume anything about them.

That’s why I’m here. The failings of religion and its inconsistency with science and secular reason are manifest and obvious to anyone who cares to look. Anyone can shed themselves of their religion, at any time. It’s simply astounding how many people have no idea they’re “allowed” to do it.

Good heavens, Chet, not only do you not read my comments, you appear not even to read your own. Here’s a reminder: immediately after quoting me, you wrote, “my opponents insist on treating the most ridiculous positions as self-evident.” Sound familiar now?

Thanks for the clarification about whether religious people are capable of reason. I had been confused by your tendency to attribute actions to abstractions like “religion” and “religious belief,” but I think I’ve got it now. I could certainly have been more careful.

And thanks for explaining your presence here: you’re an evangelist. But you know, a successful evangelist needs to understand both his or her own views and those of the “opponents.” You, on the other hand, don’t understand what thoughtful religious people believe or why they believe it, and you don’t understand even the most elementary principles of scientific reasoning (such as the distinction between testable, falsifiable claims and inductive categorical inferences). You try to compensate for your ignorance by repeatedly shouting that your opponents celebrate falsehood and are incapable of good faith arguments. This is, to say the least, an ineffective evangelistic strategy.

Finally, you might be interested in Own Gingerich’s book God’s Universe. It would complicate your picture of things in interesting and useful ways. John Polkinghorne’s Exploring Reality is pretty good as well.

Here’s a reminder: immediately after quoting me, you wrote, “my opponents insist on treating the most ridiculous positions as self-evident.” Sound familiar now?

Do you see the words “religion” or “religious” in there? I sure don’t. As I said I’ve never accused you of defending any religious positions – only of defending absurd positions. If you read a little closer I think you’d pick up on the distinction.

And thanks for explaining your presence here: you’re an evangelist.

Sure, just like anyone trying to win an argument. If you’ve taken a position on something, what’s the harm in taking part in a conversation about it? I’ve never understood the view point that regards the worst excess of religion to be the propensity of the religious to want to convince others, and therefore atheists shouldn’t try to do the same thing. What, religion does it so it must be bad? If the world’s religions came out against cancer, would I have to be for it?

I don’t see it that way. It seems to me that the worst part about religion is the sectarian conflict, the torture, the oppression – not the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses occasionally come to your door to tell you about what they believe.

You, on the other hand, don’t understand what thoughtful religious people believe or why they believe it,

What “thoughtful people” are you specifically referring to? You can’t mean yourself, since you’ve been pretty careful not to take a religious position, here. And you can’t mean Spraugge, since he’s done nothing except obfuscate the issue with Shakespearean-style nonsense about “I-thou.”

If there’s a thoughtful defense of theism, a defense that is intellectually satisfying, it’d be nice if you could present it. And if you can’t – what makes you so sure that there is one? I’ve been through this shell game quite a number of times before – the end result is always that the theist is absolutely certain that there’s an intellectual defense of theism; they just don’t happen to know what it is right at the moment.

Do you see the words “religion” or “religious” in there? I sure don’t.

Ah, I see. All this time I thought we were discussing religious propositions and beliefs. Well, then, never mind. Forget all that other stuff I said.

If there’s a thoughtful defense of theism, a defense that is intellectually satisfying, it’d be nice if you could present it.

Dude, I already gave you some science-and-religion assignments, and you want more? — Okay, but remember that there will be a quiz. I guess I would start with Richard Swinburne’s Is There a God?, though the deeper end of the pool would be his earlier The Existence of God. But who knows, maybe you’d be better off with Marilynne Robinson’s Gliead. Different books touch different people. The more reliable approach, of course, would be to spend six months participating in the life of a church and saying the Jesus prayer several times a day. Christianity, like philosophy, is properly speaking a way of life. (You’ll see from these latter recommendations that I have no interest in recommending theism, but rather Christianity. I don’t know that a generalized theism was ever much good to anybody.)

Nah worry yourself, Alan. We might have a lot in common—I come from a long line of ministers on both sides of the family, and I have certainly participated in the life of a church for six months and said many a prayer. And I have Marilyn Robinson’s Housework on my bedside table, ready to go on the recommendation of a good friend over Christmas. I just think you have a clearer prescription for a happy life than you have given in our conversations over the last few days, and I want to record it for posterity. Why? Because I like your style…and I’m trying to make a name for myself! And I’m genuinely interested in other people’s vision of The Nature and Origin of Mankind and the Universe!!!

Dude, I already gave you some science-and-religion assignments, and you want more?

…No, I don’t want “assignments”, I want the argument. I can’t have a conversation with Swineburne’s book, but I can have one with you.

Why don’t you present the argument? Why does every theist pass the buck to the theist standing next to him? Why are religious believers unable to defend the existence of God with anything but an increasingly obscure and time-consuming reading list?

The more reliable approach, of course, would be to spend six months participating in the life of a church and saying the Jesus prayer several times a day.

Been there, done that for many years. The end result of it was that I was no closer to evidence for the existence of God than when I started. True to form, every other believer was absolutely sure that a compelling, rational argument for the existence of God had been made – and absolutely none of them seemed to know what it was or where it could be found.

I see you have the same problem.

You’ll see from these latter recommendations that I have no interest in recommending theism, but rather Christianity.

The Muslims and Buddhists, as you must know, say exactly the same thing. And have just as many books.

1) If you really want a conversation, you have a funny way of going about it.

2) I don’t think the existence of God can ever be proven, but I think belief in a certain God can be shown to be reasonable. That’s what I believe Swinburne’s books (and Al Plantinga’s, and some others) do.

3) I have conversations with books all the time — it’s perhaps the chief reason I read them.

4) When I’m interested in an issue, I try to find the people who make the best possible case for their ideas — that way, if I end up rejecting their position, it will be because I really don’t buy the position, not because I have only read an inferior account of it. That’s why I recommend Swinburne rather than trying to make my own Case For God. I don’t think theism or Christianity can be properly articulated, much less defended, in a comment thread to a blog post. So it makes sense, I think, for me to point to books that clearly and forcefully articulate what I believe rather than for me to try to improvise a SparkNotes version.

5) My own reasons for being a Christian are multiple, overlapping, and complex: they involve experiences I’ve had, people I’ve known, books that I’ve read, more dark nights of the soul than I would like to remember, sins I’ve committed, catastrophic blunders I’ve made, and so on. But among all those, all I could really share with you, since I don’t know you, is the books. I feel the limitations of this, but the only alternative would be for me to write a big fat autobiography, and that’s something the world doesn’t need.

Unlike what you’ve presented here, let me put forward a falsifiable definition of what I think it would mean for a religious belief or organization to “conflict with science”: the religious organization should assert that a specific scientific finding that has been (i) confirmed through multiple replicated experiments, (ii) published in more than one major scientific journal and (iii) accepted as scientific fact by experts in the relevant field, is untrue by dint of religious revelation. I challenge you find one significant example of such conflict in all of the following religious bodies: the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church USA and the Presbyterian Church USA.

I suppose that the decomposition processes of an organic body have indeed been confirmed through multiple independent experiments; have been published accordingly; and are accepted as scientific fact. The Catholic tenet of the resurrection of Christ would seem to directly contradict these findings.

Somehow, though, I doubt that you will accept that this example meets your challenge…

If you really want a conversation, you have a funny way of going about it.

You mean, asking questions? I’m not aware of any other way to have a conversation, unfortunately. Anyway you’re still here, talking with me, so I must be doing something right.

I don’t think the existence of God can ever be proven

Let’s not get hung up on “proof”. I’ve never asked for it, and I don’t demand it. “Proof” is a thing for math and whiskey; it’s not really relevant to determining what exists in the universe (and elsewhere.)

All I want is good evidence. There’s no other good reason to believe in the existence of God.

I think belief in a certain God can be shown to be reasonable. That’s what I believe Swinburne’s books (and Al Plantinga’s, and some others) do.

I have every reason to expect that I would not find these works compelling, though obviously I find it somewhat embarrassing to be in the position of describing materials I have not directly read. Plantinga’s best offering seems to be a version of the ontological defense, which I had no idea anybody still took seriously. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone could take seriously the idea that you could simply define something into existence. Coyne’s article refutes many of Plantinga’s arguments for the existence of God. There doesn’t seem to be a one of them that isn’t essentially “dialectical prestidigitation” (to use Dawkins’ phrase.)

As for Swineburne’s book, which one Amazon reviewer refers to as “erudite gibberish”, I don’t get the sense I would find it any more satisfying or that it would answer my fairly simple question. If there is good evidence for the existence of God, or the existence of the Christian God specifically and to the exclusion of others, as you seem to believe, then it won’t take a book to present it to me – it should be the business of a paragraph at most.

My own reasons for being a Christian are multiple, overlapping, and complex: they involve experiences I’ve had, people I’ve known, books that I’ve read, more dark nights of the soul than I would like to remember, sins I’ve committed, catastrophic blunders I’ve made, and so on.

You must be aware that none of that could possibly justify belief in the existence of the Christian God. After all, there are surely just as many Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Shinto, Wiccans, and so on who have read books, known people, had “dark nights of the soul”, made blunders and committed all manner of sins both mortal and venial, yet you don’t seem to consider their autobiography an authoritative proof of the existence of their god. As an atheist, I’m sure I’ve read as many books and known as many people, and I could probably match you sin for sin and blunder for blunder. Yet you don’t seem to be moved by my autobiography.

If you had such an autobiography before you, in print, of my life, there’s surely no way you would allow it to convince you of the essential accuracy (please note I don’t say “truth”) of atheism. Why, then, do you allow your own autobiography to convince you of something no better justified? You’d never allow an autobiography to convince you of the truth of Islam; why then did you allow an autobiography to convince you of the truth of Christianity?

Because that autobiography just so happened to be yours? Pardon my impertinent question, but what on Earth is so special about you?

Because that autobiography just so happened to be yours? Pardon my impertinent question, but what on Earth is so special about you?

Nothing at all, I assure you. Which is why I’m puzzled that you want my defense of belief in God when there are so many others out there that would be much stronger and more coherent. I was just explaining that if you want my reasons for believing — as you keep saying you do — they involve multiple factors (as most of our beliefs do) and are not reducible to a paragraph, which is all you are willing to read.

I’ve recommended some books to you, and you have replied that you’re not going to read them, and are demanding that I defend the existence of God — a topic which countless people have hotly debated for countless years — in “a paragraph at most.” This is just not intellectually serious.

Also, by your “funny way of going about” having a conversation I was referring to your flat assertions that religious belief is devoid of sense and that religious people don’t argue in good faith. Why would anyone want to have a conversation with you if you essentially demand that they prove their bona fides? (Which means, I might add, that I am responding to you not because you are dong something right but because I am exceptionally holy.)

You know what’s funny? Within hours of posting on The American Scene, I get an e-mail to the address I used to register here from the “American Family Association”. Yes, that’s right, that lovely propaganda outfit that beats the drum for “curing gays”, Ben Stein’s delusional movie “Expelled”, and their so-called “pro-life” agenda. Makes you wonder…

Peter,
Your email is stored in the database with your comment, but only Scene authors have access to it. We’ve never shared any of our back-end data with anyone else, and never will.
I’m going to go out on a limb and trust that nobody with access to this data is signing you up for spam from the “American Family Association.” That would be grounds for locking out an author, in my limited editorial opinion.
Do stick around.
-Matt

Which is why I’m puzzled that you want my defense of belief in God when there are so many others out there that would be much stronger and more coherent.

I don’t think there are any others out there. I think there’s just a circle of theists, each convinced that the theist to their left is the one who has the really good, intellectual argument in favor of belief.

I think belief in the intellectually satisfying defense of the reasonableness of belief in God is every bit a matter of faith as belief in God itself is. If the best Plantinga has to offer is the ontological proof, for God’s sake, and the best you have to offer is “go read Plantinga”, my point would seem to be proven.

This is just not intellectually serious.

Nonsense. It’s the very mark of seriousness. Serious people realize that it’s a characteristic of true things that it doesn’t take much verbiage to express them. The truth is elegant. It’s falsehood that takes reams and reams of paper to be convincing.

Here, I can succinctly describe the truth and nature of God in a paragraph: “God is a figure of mythology, invented by some people and believed in by others to satisfy various needs, including the need to feel protected from the things they fear, the need to create a coherent, stabilizing tribal identity, and the need to understand and feel control over events in their lives and in the universe.”

See? Simple, when you’re not trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes.

Which means, I might add, that I am responding to you not because you are dong something right but because I am exceptionally holy.

Well, then, perhaps I might impose on your divinity and repeat a question that I don’t perceive you to have answered. You’ve explained that it’s your “autobiography” – events that have happened in your life – that lead you to believe the truth of Christianity. Yet you’ve also seemed to agree with me that nothing in your autobiography is particularly unique or special. And yet, your autobiography convinces you of the truth of Christianity, while the identical biographies of Muslims or atheists fail to convince you of the truth of those positions.

Serious people realize that it’s a characteristic of true things that it doesn’t take much verbiage to express them.

Cool! Then please explain to me quantum theory in a paragraph. It appears that I’ve been wasting my time reading books all these years, when I could have been evaluating them by hearsay (you haven’t read Plantinga, but you think his “best offering seems to be a version of the ontological defense”) and by looking at the comments on Amazon.com. Thanks for redefining intellectual seriousness for me, Chet.

So, following your model, I can “succinctly describe the truth and nature of God” in less than a paragraph. Here you go:

Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so.

And now I’m just as intellectually serious as you are. Let me know when the rules change, but until they do, TTFN.

“Contrary to our experience at the macro level, the location and velocity of a particle cannot be determined with arbitrary accuracy. Rather, location and velocity of particles are best described as probabilistic wave functions representing superpositions of discreet states. Conversely, wave phenomena can be represented as emission of discreet particles.”

Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so.

That’s an epigram, not a paragraph. And it doesn’t answer my question. I didn’t think it was a particularly difficult question, Alan, but you continue to evade it. Must I repeat it a third time?

Gosh, can’t imagine why anyone would suspect you of arguing in poor faith.

Serious people realize that it’s a characteristic of true things that it doesn’t take much verbiage to express them.

Chet, until you can produce one or preferably two Amazon comments purporting to summarize books which seem to support theses which support this thesis, I shall consider it an utter ludicrosity. (Properly cited Facebook rants are also acceptable.)

And yet we could detect, John, if /etc/ had been written to…. because something would be there that wasn’t there before. If there wasn’t – then nobody wrote to etc.

If somebody wrote to /etc/, and our hypothetical ai detected the fact, then such a program program would presumably record and publish publish its findings. But imagine for a second that such an ai program communicated to another ai program on a different machine where nobody had written to /etc/ within the run of the program. Such an ai would have no ability to formulate a hypothesis, based on the observations available to an ai program running with normal privileges on a unix system, to explain the alteration of a file in /etc/. Such a program could not predict or replicate its findings. In other words, if operating under the rules of scientific observation, our second ai, in the machine with the unmodified /etc/, would have to reject as unprovable the claims made by the first ai about an unaccountably modified file.

Now, of course, it goes without saying that the ai running on our second machine would have no way to tell if its system actually had a /etc/ directory implemented in ROM, and a system with no defined root account. In fact, both programs could run on special purposes systems with no root user, and the observation by our first ai could have arisen from a program glitch. The point remains that under our closed system, neither ai would have any way to know, because of the inherent limits to their knowledge.

The idea of a God who takes undetectable action in the universe isn’t just inconsistent with sense, and inconsistent with observation. It’s inconsistent with the meaning of “action.”

If nobody had claimed to detect the actions of the Creator in the universe, this discussion would have taken a very different tack. We have this discussion in the way we do because millions of people, across the centuries, have detected the presence of a Creator in various ways. Every year, millions of people have spiritual experiences, from miracles to visions to signs and portents. A huge amount of documentary evidence reaching back to the dawn of civilization attests to these experiences. Few if any human societies have arisen without some form of religion. To label each of these claims false, all of that history irrelevant, you would have to claim that you understand all possible modes of existence, and that, as we all know, we can prove we can never do.

But imagine for a second that such an ai program communicated to another ai program on a different machine where nobody had written to /etc/ within the run of the program.

I can’t speak the capabilities of software that doesn’t exist, but the second ai would simply peek at the /etc/directory of the first and see that it had been written to – that a file was now there that was not before, or that one was missing that had been there. Even if the second ai missed the action you refer to, it could at least be alerted to the possibility that it might happen, and the community of science-minded ai’s could keep an eye on each other’s /etc/ directories for a while – or even their entire filesystems – and, at some point, accrue enough evidence that somebody was making changes.

The change is always detectable because if it isn’t, by definition it isn’t a change. Not even God can do nothing and claim to have done something. Not if words have meaning.

If nobody had claimed to detect the actions of the Creator in the universe, this discussion would have taken a very different tack.

Er, so I see we’ve gone from “God moves in completely undetectable ways” to the complete opposite position “God is so detectable millions of people do it every single year, so what the hell is wrong with you, stupid.”

Every year, millions of people have spiritual experiences, from miracles to visions to signs and portents.

And every year one in four Americans is diagnosed with a mental illness. For one in four of those, the illness is characterized as “serious” according to the DSMIV. One in 16 of 350 million Americans is almost 22 million – there’s your “millions” of visions, signs, portents, what have you. There’s ten times as many mentally unwell people needed to explain every instance of “divine experience.” Of course, that doesn’t even begin to count the number of people who render themselves temporarily altered via drugs.

Few if any human societies have arisen without some form of religion.

And few if any human societies have arisen without disease, murder, rape, and slavery.

To label each of these claims false, all of that history irrelevant, you would have to claim that you understand all possible modes of existence

I only need understand one mode of existence, and that is life in the physical universe we inhabit – the one that doesn’t have any gods in it.

I can’t speak the capabilities of software that doesn’t exist, but the second ai would simply peek at the /etc/directory of the first and see that it had been written to – that a file was now there that was not before, or that one was missing that had been there. Even if the second ai missed the action you refer to, it could at least be alerted to the possibility that it might happen, and the community of science-minded ai’s could keep an eye on each other’s /etc/ directories for a while – or even their entire filesystems – and, at some point, accrue enough evidence that somebody was making changes.

Let’s make the relatively trivial assumption that our hypothetical ai programs run on unix boxes which, like many if not most, do not share their /etc/ directories on networked file systems. With no networked file systems, different ai programs, running on different machines, however “science minded” could never hope to formulate a theory about how alterations to the /etc/ directory took place, and never use such a theory to predict the appearance of changes in the /etc/ directory for any of them. Nor could any of our imaginary tasks ever successfully replicate any process by which any of them could change /etc/. They might take on trust (or faith) that the /etc/ directory on some of their machines had changed, but they would never have enough information to build a theory that would conform to the requirements of the scientific method.

The change is always detectable because if it isn’t, by definition it isn’t a change. Not even God can do nothing and claim to have done something. Not if words have meaning.

I’ll leave the question of whether all change, in principle, allows for detection. I’ll simply deal with the obvious question: can every technique and every instrument detect every change. Since hundreds of trivial examples exist of quite real changes that certain instruments and techniques cannot detect, I observe that science, itself, constitutes an instrument, a powerful one but an instrument none the less, with definite limitations. Therefore, changes can, in principle, occur in our world that scientists can neither detect nor verify.

As for your comment about mental illness: ascribing mental illness, ipso facto, to anyone who makes observations you disagree with makes your ideas tautalogically simply self-reinforcing. I also googled the incidence of delusional illness, and discovered that the incidence of psychiatric illness capable of causing actual delusions comes to about one in three hundred; I assure you that would hardly suffice to account for all the varieties of religious experience.

Let’s make the relatively trivial assumption that our hypothetical ai programs run on unix boxes which, like many if not most, do not share their /etc/ directories on networked file systems

Sigh. Fine, then the AI hacks a Honda Asimo and uses it to type on its own keyboard and view its own monitor in the server room, where it has unfettered access. Again, nothing can be a change that is undetectable because, by definition, it cannot be said to have “changed.”

I’ll leave the question of whether all change, in principle, allows for detection.

Leave it aside? It’s highly germaine. “Change” implies a difference in states before and after an event. The before and after state cannot be identical, because then no change occurred.

It has nothing to do with whether I agree with them or not, rather, whether or not they agree with consensus reality. It’s the same principle that allows me to reject the proposition that you are 19th century French general Napoleon Bonaparte.

I also googled the incidence of delusional illness, and discovered that the incidence of psychiatric illness capable of causing actual delusions comes to about one in three hundred; I assure you that would hardly suffice to account for all the varieties of religious experience.

I don’t claim it accounts for all varieties of religious experience. Most “religious experience” is just people going to church on Sunday and feeling good about it. I maintain that nothing about that sensation requires any supernatural explanation whatsoever.

But even one in three hundred people – assuming, absurdly, that every single human with delusions was identified and diagnosed by psychiatrists – is still 18 million human beings worldwide. More than sufficient to account for every “observation” of angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, Bigfoot, aliens, visions, portents, and other manner of supernatural nonsense that can’t be explained by more prosaic methods, i.e. dishonesty.